Meg Cabot - Insatiable

“Meena?” Emil was confused. Many things about his wife confused him. He was certain that even if they spent an eternity together-and it already felt like they had-he’d never fully understand her. “The prince…and Meena Harper? But she’s-”

“Why not?” Mary Lou gave her naturally curly-and still naturally blond-hair a flip. “At first glance she may not seem like his type, but I like her. She’s got that cute little figure, and a pixie cut suits her. Most women can’t pull it off, you know, but she works it. And if the prince likes her, just think how grateful he’ll be to us. Besides,” she added with a shrug, “all she does is work to keep her and that no-good brother of hers financially afloat. I think she needs a break.”

“She likes her job,” Emil said, thinking of all the times he’d seen his neighbor in her pajamas barefoot in their floor’s trash room, disgruntledly stuffing heavily crossed-out script pages down the chute to the incinerator.

Well, maybe she didn’t always like her job.

“Oh, sure,” Mary Lou said. “The soap opera thing. But do you think she’d work if she didn’t have to?”

Emil thought about this. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, that shows what you know about women, which is nothing. Look at those ladies she writes about on Insatiable, Victoria Worthington Stone and her daughter, Tabby. Victoria’s never had a job in her life, except for that time she was a model. Oh, and a fashion designer. Oh, and when she was a race car driver, but that was only for a week before she crashed and lost the baby and was in that coma. Those aren’t even real jobs. They say you write about what you wish would happen to you. So, obviously Meena wishes she didn’t have a job.”

“Or,” Emil said, “she wishes she were a race car driver.”

“And Prince Lucien would be able to provide for her.” Mary Lou went on, ignoring him. “And since the prince likes writing, the two of them already have something in common.”

“It’s a very different kind of writing,” Emil said. “Lucien writes historical nonfiction. And anyway, he made it very clear when I spoke to him that he wanted to keep his visit under the radar. We’re at a very critical time with the Dracul. These murders-”

“Oh, stop being such a worrywart,” Mary Lou said. “No man wouldn’t want to have dinner with a lot of pretty ladies.” She laughed and turned to poke her husband in his belly, which stuck out ever so slightly over the waistband of his trousers. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy being the center of attention of me and all my friends. Not that you aren’t…”

“Well.” Emil felt the pressure in his gut receding slightly. “Maybe he won’t mind so much. A man has to eat, after all.”

“Exactly,” Mary Lou exclaimed. “And so why not do it in the company of a lot of lovely, accomplished ladies?”

“Why not?” Emil asked.

Maybe, he thought, his wife was right:

The man did have to eat, after all.

Chapter Fourteen

3:45 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Meena stared at the bright red numbers on the digital clock in her bedroom. Three forty-five. She had five hours before she had to leave for the office. Four more to sleep before she had to get up to start getting ready.

Except that she couldn’t sleep. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, grinding her teeth, and thinking about Yalena-all she could see was a picture of the girl’s body, battered almost beyond recognition-and Cheryl and CDI and the job she hadn’t gotten and Jon and her parents and David and the countess and Leisha and Adam and the baby.

Now she’d never get to sleep.

There was only one answer to Meena’s problem, and it lay in a little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She hated resorting to pills, but lately she’d been relying on them more and more.

She was just about to reach for her secret stash of pills in the medicine cabinet when she heard it:

The clickety-clack of Jack Bauer’s claws on the hardwood floor behind her.

Seeing her up and around, Jack Bauer thought it was morning and time for his first walk of the day.

“Okay, Jack,” Meena whispered to him. “Okay. We’ll go.”

She spat out her mouth guard, leaving it in the sink, then slipped as quietly as she could into her coat and a pair of sneakers and got Jack Bauer’s leash from its hook.

She’d just take him on a short walk, she decided, then go back to bed. She’d be home in less than fifteen minutes. With half a pill, she could still get a full four hours of restorative sleep before work. Everything would be okay.

In the lobby of Meena’s building, Pradip, the night doorman, had dozed off with his head resting on one of his textbooks. He was studying to be a masseur, which Meena thought was a fine career option for him, since people were having multiple careers nowadays well into their eighties, and his death didn’t appear to be imminent.

Meena crept past him, careful not to disturb him-all the staff in her building worked so hard-and slipped out the automatic doors to the sidewalk, where Jack Bauer hurried to relieve himself against the potted palm just beside the red carpet by the building’s entrance, as was his ritual. Meena waited beside him, inhaling the fresh morning air. Or was it still night? She wasn’t sure. The sky above was a dark blue wash, a paler blue at the edges, where it disappeared behind the tall buildings.

Meena gave Jack Bauer’s leash a tug, and he obediently began trotting beside her. They had a route they always took this time of night-down Park Avenue to Seventy-eighth; past St. George’s Cathedral, currently closed for badly needed renovations; then back down Eightieth, and to the apartment.

But for some reason that night-or that morning-Jack was feeling jumpy. Meena could tell, because he ignored some of the places he usually liked to take an inordinately long time sniffing and just kept trotting forward, nervously snuffling the air, almost as if…well, as if he were anticipating something.

But because this was the way he often behaved-his name was, after all, Jack Bauer: he was a jumble of nerves, always expecting the worst, barking at their front door when it was only the countess and her husband coming home from a party-Meena thought nothing of it.

She let Jack Bauer pull her along, thinking idly about work. How was she going to fit a prince for Cheryl into Shoshona’s vampire story line?

And Yalena-should Meena have followed her to her meeting with the boyfriend? She was wondering whether she could have said something to him, given him a look, done something to let him know she was onto him, when she noticed the first other person she’d seen on foot since leaving her building, coming toward her on the same side of the street, but from the opposite direction.

It was a man.

But he was a very tall man, dressed in a long black trench coat that flapped behind him almost like a cape.

Meena tightened her grip on Jack Bauer’s leash, and not just because the dog had begun growling. She was alone on a dark street approaching a large man she didn’t know. What on earth was he doing out at four in the morning without a dog if he wasn’t drunk?

She didn’t blame Jack Bauer for being suspicious. She was suspicious, too.

But as they approached the wide steps to St. George’s Cathedral, surrounded by scaffolding, Meena saw from the security lights shining down from the church spires that the man was unusually good looking-maybe in his mid to late thirties-and was in no way giving off signs that he didn’t belong in the ritzy neighborhood. His clothes were impeccably tailored and in good taste; his dark hair, brushed back from his temples without a hint of gray, immaculately groomed. Even his sideburns were the perfect length.